Molecules Quotes

“Popular culture equates entropy with disorder. It is not a bad shorthand: a system’s entropy is a measure of how many ways its atoms can be reconfigured without any noticeable difference. If someone were to come into my office and reshuffle the chaos of paper into different heaps, the chances are I would not notice. But if they were to rearrange all the papers in the carefully ordered filing system that I can only dream about, I would soon detect the change. Crudely speaking, ordered systems have fewer indistinguishable configurations – a lower entropy – than disordered ones.
The Second Law is, then, really an expression of the following: it is more likely that a system will progress from a more-ordered to a less-ordered state, simply because there are more of the latter than the former. When one is dealing with systems that contain countless trillions of molecules, this probabilistic statement becomes a near certainty. The Second Law is a law only because its violation is overwhelmingly improbable.”
― Philip Ball, Molecules: A Very Short Introduction

“Much of the skill in doing science resides in knowing where in the hierarchy you are looking – and, as a consequence, what is relevant and what is not.”
― Philip Ball, Molecules: A Very Short Introduction